Transcripts
1. Make Brushes from Photos in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Make and Use Photo Brushes in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're making brushes from a photo in Photoshop. We're going to make a silhouette brush and a couple of textured brushes. We'll use the brushes with a watercolor background to make some art pieces. As you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. Recommendations like this help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started making brushes from a photograph in Photoshop.
2. Make Brushes from Photos - Part 1: So that we can make a brush form of photograph. I've chosen a photograph for us to use and it's this pineapple here, it's available from Morguefile. I'm going to give you the download link for it. Morguefile has changed a little recently, so when you go to this page, you're just going to click here on the download link and that's going to download it to your computer. Now, we're also going to be using a watercolor image. I'm going to show that to you now too. This is from DeviantArt, so I'm going to give you a link to this person's area of DeviantArt and the watercolor texture that I'm using is the one that's called number 7, it's here. But you could choose any of these watercolor textures that you like. You just click on it to see it and you can just right-click and download it. Now, once you've downloaded the watercolor texture and the image from Morguefile, you're ready to get started. I'm going to just close diagram for the moment, I'm going to go and open my pineapple image in Photoshop. Here's the pineapple image, and the first thing that we're going to do is to get rid of the background. I'm just going to enlarge it by pressing "Control" or "Command Zero", that just scales the image up, so that takes the available space in my Window here. I'm going to use the magic wand tool because it'll do a really good job of this background. The reason why I chose this image was that the background is so easy to get rid of. I've set my tolerance to 30, that means that when I click on the "Background", quite a bit of it is going to be selected at a time. I've also disabled contiguous, that's pretty important because I want to get to these areas in here where the background is actually trapped by the leaves of the pineapple. I'm just going to click on the background here, I'm going to make sure that I have this option selected, add to selection and that will allow me to continue to click on the background and just add areas to the selection. It's probably about three or four clicks and you should have pretty much the whole background selected here. I'm going to open up my last palette and I'm going to add a mask to it, so I'm just going to click here on the "Mask" icon and the mask is gone in the wrong way, so I'm just going to click on the "Mask" itself. It has this little border around it, which is telling me I'm working on the mask and not the pineapple. I'm going to press "Control" or "Command I" to invert the selection. You can see that the background has pretty much been removed. Now, the first brush that I want to make is a silhouette brush. I want to make a selection around the pineapple. The easiest way to do this is to go to the mask itself and "Control" or "Command" click on the layer thumbnail and that just makes a selection that is the exact shape of this pineapple. I'm going to add a new layer by clicking on the "New Layer" icon. I'm going to set my default colors, which I can do by clicking here by just pressing the letter "D". I want black as my foreground color, and I'm going to press "Alt" "Backspace" option "Delete" on the Mac to fill this selection with black. Now, I can deselect my selection with "Control" or "Command D". This is going to be my silhouette. Now, there are a few little spots in here that if you wanted to clean them up, you could do so. You'll do so by going and getting a brush and you'll paint with black and you're just going to target this layer and just paint in black over these areas where there's a little bit of show through. Now, if you're working with a brush, you'll find that you'll get better results in this instance with a hard brush because you won't have any softness to it, you can just very quickly paint over these areas should you wish to do so. Now, I'm not going to worry too much about it. I'm just going to go ahead now and "Save" this as a brush. To do so, all I need to do is choose "Edit" and "Define Brush Preset". I'm going to call this silhouette pineapple and I'll click "Okay". I've created my pineapple brush, so I'm just going to go and select a different brush because I don't want to be dragging a pineapple around with me for the next few minutes. I'm going to turn this layer off and we're going to make the next brushes, and the next brushes are going to be texture brushes. What I want to say when I use these next brushes is the actual texture of the pineapple here. Brushes in Photoshop can only be black, white, or shades of gray, so we don't get any color in our brushes, but we can get a lot of texture by harnessing the texture in the original image itself. I'm going to add a couple of layers here, and I click on this "Background Layer" with its mask and I'm going to choose "Layer", "New Adjustment Layer" and I'm going to choose black and white because I want to convert it to black and white so I can get a good look at what my black and white is going to look like. Right now this is a very uninspiring black and white. It's really pretty much all gray, so what I'm going to do is use the slide is here to adjust the colors in the underlying image. Now, this was a pineapple, so a lot of the colors here are going to be things like yellows and greens. I'm just going to start with the yellows and I'm going to drag them to the right. You can see now that we've got some white areas appearing inside our pineapple. I'm going to test green. I'm not sure which direction I want to take my green in. Well, I think I want it in this direction. I'm checking cyan and there's quite a bit of cyan in this, mainly in the top of the pineapple. Again, I'm just going to drag it out here to lighten this area, try and build in a bit of contrast here. Let's see about blue. Well, there's some blue around the edges of the pineapple and I can decide whether I want them to be lighter or darker. I think I'm just going to go a little bit dark on those. Magenta. Well, this again, some magenta in those areas where there was blue and red, we can test red. Yeah, well, there's a lot of red here. The red is really interestingly in these little areas, so we can decide whether we want them to be dark or light. I'm thinking light is probably going to work for me, but you can make your own decision about that. I want to add a little bit more contrast into this pineapple too before I make it into a brush. With this black and white adjustment last selected, I'm going to add another one. Layer, a new adjustment layer, I'm going for curves. With curves, what we can do is we can adjust the image based on its tonal range, based on the black pixels in the image of this or the white pixels in the image. This is a curve line at the moment, it's no adjustment, nothing has happened to this image at this stage. If I drag up on the curve here in the lighter area of the image, it makes the lighter pixels lighter. If I drag down in the dark areas, it makes the darker pixels darker. Because the curve is steeper here in the middle, I've built in some contrasts. This is the before and this is the after, it's quite a different image and because we're just looking at creating a brush, we're going to cross this image to get the best brush we can. I'm actually going to go for a little bit more light here. You can also click on this hand here, which is available in lighter versions of Photoshop and you can see as I'm holding the eye dropper over the leaf here, I'm being shown in this panel here exactly where the color is. I could drag up or down if I want it to dark or light in this area. You can go through and just identify parts of the image that you may want to lighten or darken. But I'm pretty happy with the result I have here, so I'm just going to close that dialogue. Let's go back to the last pallet. I'm going to now make my brush just based on this image. Again, I'm going to choose "Edit" and then "Define Brush Preset", and this is going to be pineapple and I'll click "Okay". Now, there's one more brush that I have to make before I go because this is a photograph, I'm going to get into trouble if I try and paint this in a light color on a dark background because it's going to end up looking like an old film negative. What I need to do is I need to create a negative brush. I need to create something that I can use to paint on a dark background with a lighter color. I'm going to add here another adjustment layer. Very simple one this time, layer, a new adjustment layer, invert. All this adjustment layer does is invert the image, make it a negative of what it was before. This is going to be a fantastic brush for me to go ahead and paint with light on a dark surface, so I'm going to make it another brush. Now, if I just go to choose "Edit", "Define Brush Preset", you can see it's not available there. The reason for this is that I don't have the image selected here. We've go back now and choose "Define Brush Preset." I've got this different negatives style image. I'm just going to call this negative pineapple then click "Okay". Now, we've made our three brushes and we're ready to go ahead and test them out and see how we might be able to use them to make off in Photoshop.
3. Make Brushes from Photos - Part 2: I've finished working on this image now so I can just close it, I don't need it any longer. I'm just going to close it without saving it. We're going to now use that pineapple brush on a new document. I'm going to choose ''File'' and then ''New.'' I'm going to make a document that's 2,000 pixels wide by 2,000 pixels tall and just click "Okay." I'm going to add a new layer to it and I'm going to fill it with a color. So we're going to start off with a white background. So white is my background color, I'll press ''Control Backspace'' command to delete on the Mac to fill it with white. I'm going to click on the ''New Layer'' icon, black is my foreground color, I'm going to click on my ''Brush.'' Then I'm going to go and select the second-to-last brush that we made which is the positive textured pineapple. This is pretty good size here for this document so I'm just going to click once to create it. Then we have an image that is a brush and it's in a pineapple shape. Now let's see what would happen if we were to paint this same brush but with a lighter color on a dark background. I'm going to add a new layer to this document, I'm going to press ''Alt Backspace'' option delete to fill it with black. I'm going to this time reverse my background and foreground colors. So now I'm painting with white and I'm just going to click once to make my brush as you can see it looks like a negative image. So it's not an appropriate brush to use when we want to paint in light colors on a dark background. But we made a brush that we could use. So again, I'm going into the brushes pallet and this time I'm going to select the last brush because this one is the negative one. When we paint with a negative brush using a light color on a dark background, we're going to get a positive pineapple. So it's always helpful when you making brushes from photos to think in terms of how you might use it and I generally make two versions, both a positive and a negative for this very reason.
4. Make Brushes from Photos - Part 3: Now that we've tested our brushes, it's time to have a look and see how we might make some art from those brushes. I'm going to open up the watercolor texture that I downloaded, so I have it here. The first thing I'm going to do is to go and use my silhouette brush to cut out a pineapple shaped pace from this watercolor texture. So I'm going to click here on the layer mask icon because I want to add a layer mask to this layer. I'm going to go and get my brush, and this time I'm going to go and get my silhouette brush. So that's the third to last brush that I had here. It's a bit too big for this watercolor texture, so I'm going to press the open square bracket key to size it down. I'm just going to eyeball it and see if I can fit it in this area, so I'm thinking that's pretty good. It's 1300 pixels tall. I'm painting with black, got black here is my foreground color, and I've got my mask selected. You can see it a little markers around here that tell me that the mask itself is selected. So I'm just going to click once. What that does is it pokes a hole in the watercolor texture, the shape of the pineapple, exactly what I didn't want to happen. I can click on this layer mask thumbnail here, and press "Control" or "Command" I, to invert these colors to make black white and white black. This is giving me now my mask effect. It would look better if I added a layer beneath it. So what I'm going to do is Control or Command, click on the new layer icon here to add a new layer at the very bottom of the last stack. Then I'm going to fill it with white. It's selected here, white is my foreground color, Alt, Backspace, Option, Delete to fill it with white. Now, if this were not dark enough for you, you can make this a little bit darker. One way to do this is to drag this layer onto the new layer icon. So you're making a second copy of it, and then blend the two together with a darkening blend mode, and the best one to use for this is "Multiply". "Multiply" will always darken things. So this has given us a darker version of our cutout pineapple. Let's go ahead and build on this particular image and see what we could do with the other brushes that we have. I'm going to add a new blank layer just above everything here. I'm going to fill it with white, right now white is my foreground color. So I'll press Alt, Backspace, Option Delete, to fill it with white. Let's go and get one of our other pineapple brushes. We're going to get the positive one, which is the second to last one here. We're going to size it down, and before I size mine down to 1300, so I'm just again, pressing the open square bracket K, until up in here, it says 1300. Then I know I've got my brush the right size. Now I need to be painting with black, so I'm going to reverse these two colors. I'm just going to click once to create a brush right in the middle of this layer. Then I'm going to choose a different tool, so I'm not dragging my pineapple around with me. I'm going to use a blend mode now, so I'm just going to work down the blend modes. If you're working on a Mac, you need to make sure you don't have a brush tool selected, and you can press Shift plus or Shift minus to work through your blend modes. On a PC, it's a little easy, you can just use the down arrow key. Now, as I'm doing this, you can see I haven't quite put my two layers on top of each other, but we can fix that in a minute. I'm just looking for what the blends look like. Color dodge is the one that I'm going to come back to in a minute. But you can just travel all the way down the blend modes and just see how these two layers interact with each other. On a PC, as soon as you get to the end, you have to start arrowing back up. On the Mac, you can just keep going around, they'll just loop around. I'm going to Linear Dodge or color dodge. Actually, I think color dodge will be it for me. But I want to align the top pineapple up with the one underneath, and right now it's going to be a little bit difficult. So let's just go back to multiply because that's good blend mode to use. I've got the move tool. What I'm going to do is just move this pineapple into position. Now if it insists on snapping and you don't want it to snap, you can hold the Control or Command K, and that will allow you to move it in very small increments. So, I'm just placing my brushed pineapple over the top of the watercolor version. Now I'm going to go back to my blend modes. I'm going back to my color dodge and just test it with Linear Dodge, no color dodge is the one I want. I'm just going to click away by choosing a different tool. Again, if I think that this is not dark enough, I can come back to this layer and I could add another version of it. Again, by just dragging and dropping this version which has got a multiply blend mode onto the new layer icon, I get a copy of it with the multiply blend mode already applied to it. If that's too much, I can just drop the opacity of this top layer to get sort of a blended effect. So there's one creative use that we could have. Now I want to test a second one out in this document and I want to be able to switch between the two, really easily later on. So we're going to learn something now about layer comps in Photo shop. Layer comps are a way that you can have multiple things going on in a single image. So I'm going to choose window and then layer comps, and this little dialogue just pops up here. What we want to do is to save the current look of this documents. So I'm going to click here on the new button, and I'm just going to call this, black pineapple brush. I'm just going to make a comment that I've used the color dodge blend mode. So just to say color dodge blend mode, to lighten the pineapple. So I've made myself a note here and I'm going to click "OK". I'm just going to close down layer comps for now. We're going to come back in the next video and do something a little bit different with this pineapple, and then save that as a layer comp, so we can switch instantly between them, giving us a really handy way of being able to compare two looks of a single document.
5. Make Brushes from Photos - Part 4: So we're back with our pineapple image. I want to turn off this top brush because I want to see what things are going to look like if I use my white negative brush instead of this black one. So I've turned off this layer, but I don't want to delete it because I want to be able to make it visible again later on. I'm pretty happy with my pineapple here, so I'm going to add a new layer. I'm going to switch to make white my foreground color. I'm going to click on my brush tool and I'm going to select the very last brush, which is the one that is negative. It's negative, which means that it paints well in light colors like white on a dark background, like a green watercolor background. Again, it's too big, so I'm going to size it down with the open square bracket key. So that's 1300 because I know that's the exact match for the layer below. I'm going to line up my brush as accurately as I can and click once. This has given me another different effect with my watercolor blend underneath. So I'm going to save this as a layer comp. Let me get rid of my brush. I'm going to choose window, Layer Comps. I'm going to add a new one. So I'm going to click here. I'm going to call this white negative brush. There's no blend on that, I'll just click "Okay". Now we have two layer comps. That's a black pineapple brush and a white negative brush, and we can switch between the two just by clicking on them. I've got the Move tool selected right now. So I'm seeing the handles on the screen. I can't actually stop that from happening. But what I can do is choose a different tool so that I don't see those handles. So now I'm going to click on the "Black Pineapple Brush". This is the effect we get when we use a black pineapple brush over the watercolor and blended in using Color Dodge blend mode. This is what it looks like when we use the white negative brush instead. There are two very different looks to this project. This Layer Comps tool allows us to switch instantly between the two. What Photoshop's doing is making these layers visible or invisible, according to whether they were visible or invisible or not even created, when we created the layer comp in the first place. Layer Comps are a wonderful way to use a single document with multiple effects. So you can switch instantly between them to determine which you like best. Layer Comps are going to be saved with the image. So I provided you save this as a PSD file. The Layer Comps are going to be saved inside it. At any time you can come to the Layer Comps dialogue by choosing, window, and then Layer Comps and you can switch between the two of them.
6. Make Brushes from Photos - Part 5: The final effect we're going to make with this brush is something that uses the hard mix blend mode. Now it may not be to your taste, but I'm going to set the document up in such a way that you might learn something about how to sample colors more efficiently in Photoshop. I think it's worth looking at, even if the image itself is not to your taste. We're going to create a brand new document and it's going to be 1,600 pixels by 2,000, and I'll click "Okay". Now I'm going to fill the background layer with a color, but I'm not going to select my color here first because that's not going to give me a lot of flexibility later on when I want to re-sample a different color. What I'm going to do is I'm going to fill this layer using the layer fill tool, Layer, New Fill Layer, Solid Color. I'm going to click "Okay", and I'm just going to sample a color. It needs to be a lightish color. I'll just click "Okay". In the last palette that just gives me a single layer in this document that is created using the color fill tool. I'm going to add a new layer on top here, and I'm going to fill it with white. I'll just press "All Backspace" option delete to fill it with white, and then I'm going to paint my pineapple in black, and I'm going to use the positive brush. I'm going to click on the Brush tool, make sure that I'm using the second to last brush, which is the positive brush here, and I'm just going to click once on the document. I now have a black pineapple painted on white over the top of a fill color layer. What I'm going to do next is I'm going to blend this in using the Hard Mix Blend Mode. I'm just going to click here on "Hard Mix". Hard Mix is an interesting blend mode. What it does is it converts every color in the image to either red, green, blue, magenta, cyan, yellow or black. There's nothing in between, you only get those colors. But what's interesting about the Hard Mix Blend Mode is that it's a combination of this layer and this layer that gives you the result. If you have a different color or a slightly different brightness or darkness in the color underneath, then you're going to get a different result, which is why we used the fill layer here because I can double-click on here to open up the color picker, and I can start sampling colors here, and as I sample a color, the image is changed immediately. It just wouldn't be possible to do with the standard color picker. You'd have to select the color and then dump the color into the image, and it would be a very time-consuming job. But here we can get to experiment with the colors, and we can say how selecting slightly different tones or values of a color is impacting what we see in the image. We can go to a totally different color here, and this is actually the result I'm trying to achieve is to pull three colors out of this image, the blue, the cyan, and the black. I've managed to do that by just again, selecting a light color and just trying to say if I can find something where I get this effect. As I drag around, I'll be able to say more or less blue and perhaps a little less or no black. If you want to adjust your color more subtly, you can just come in here and click in a color and use the down arrow or the up arrow to increase the color one number at a time. If you use shift, you're going to increase the 10 at a time. You can see that adjusting the red channel here is having no effect on this image at all. Let's try the green channel, while green channel is having a really big impact on the blue. The blue channel, well, when we start to bring it down with starting to see green as well as cyan and black. By moving around this color picker, using this fill layer, we can craft the kind of image that we're looking for. I'm just going to click "Okay". Now of course, the pineapple itself is also having an effect on this. I'm going to add an adjustment layer to this so that we can say how changes in the pineapple's darkness or lightness will affect the Hard Mix Blend Mode. Layer, new adjustment layer, just going to use a simple levels adjustment for this and click "Okay". I want to clip it cyanate to click on this icon here so that in the last pallet it's only being applied to a pineapple and not the fill layer. Again, I'm just going to double-click here. This is my levels adjustment. It's similar to a curve in that it has the histogram here. These are the dark pixels, these are the light pixels, these are the mid tones and by dragging in, we can make more or less dark pixels. Again, we can impact how these colors are appearing through the Hard Mix Blend Mode. Now there's an adjustment here that you very seldom use, but today is the day you're going to use it, and that is these output levels here. If you drag in on the output levels, you can also impact the image. It's a little bit less interesting, perhaps at the white end, but a little more interesting at the black end. Again, you could just work on crafting an image using these adjusters here. As I said, it's personal aesthetics as to whether you like this effect or not. But anytime that you want to be able to sample color and see it live, then I fill layer like this is the way to go, rather than actually filling a layer with color using the standard color picker options. Your project for this class is going to go and make a brush from a photo and try some of these effects yourself. Post the results in the course project area. Now I'm going to give you the download link in the class projects section for the pineapple if you want to use that in your project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about making brushes from photos in Photoshop. If you did enjoy this class, when you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. This will help others to identify this as a course that they might want to take, and if you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
